Rhys Thom and I recently visited Mexico City where we met with two researchers at UNAM - Mexico’s National University - who are doing some fascinating research. Robyn Hudson, a charismatic professor, originally from Australia who has been living in Mexico City for quite some time, and her colleague Marco Guarneros, a fellow biomedical researcher, conducted a study comparing the ability of Mexico City’s residents to detect certain smells, with the ability of people living in a Tlaxcala, a neighboring town. Mexico City and Tlaxcala are similar in many respects - they share a similar culture and climate, situated high in the mountains of Mexico. But there is one crucial difference: Mexico City has much higher levels of air pollution.
When compared to their neighbors, people living in Mexico City need higher concentrations of a smell in order to identify it, a clear indication that their sense of smell is deteriorating. Read the rest of this entry »
“We clearly want to move into a much stronger system of public transport in order to avoid excessive dependence on individualized forms of transport, which are both energy using and emission generating,'’ Montek Singh Ahluwalia, head of India’s Planning Commission, said today. His comments came just one day after a speech by India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh saying that India may “overhaul” its public transportation system
In this great ad from MTV a donkey named Lolo takes the bus. The caption says “If Lolo can save the planet, why can’t you? Leave the car and take public transit. Let’s stop global warming.”
The car industry’s total annual advertising expenditures for the US alone were $16.3 billion in 2006 according to media research firm TNS Media Intelligence. In the face of this barrage of automobile advertising, it’s nice to see some time, money, and creativity invested in well done TV spots promoting public transportation. I’d love to see more of this. If anybody has any more examples of this kind of messaging please post them here or send them to me at rthom[at]wri[dot]org.
Way to go MTV! Check out the campaign at mtvswitch.org.
Robin Chase, founder and former CEO of Zipcar, joins TheCityFix.com as a regular contributor. Robin will be cross posting select items from her personal blog, Network Musings, where she’s been writing on the world of sustainable transportation.
Robin Chase is founder and CEO of GoLoco, an online ridesharing community. GoLoco helps people quickly arrange to share car trips of all lengths between trusted friends, neighbors, and colleagues, and handles online payments from passengers to drivers for their share of the trip costs. GoLoco’s innovative combination of social networks and online payment systems recasts how we think about car travel, making it a time for socializing and with a new emphasis on trip efficiency, in order to reduce per passenger costs.
Robin is also founder and former CEO of Zipcar, the largest carsharing company in the world. Zipcar’s use of the Internet and wireless technology enables rental cars to emulate personal cars. Zipcar’s disruptive technology gives its members on-demand access to cars by-the-hour, revolutionizing people’s relationship to their cars and improving the quality of urban life for all. Read the rest of this entry »
A few years ago, the celebrated economist Steven D. Levitt argued in Freakonomics that the legalization of abortion in 1973 was one of the primary reasons for the drop in crime in the 1990’s, a period when the first generation of children born after Roe v. Wade would enter their twenties, statistically the most violent period of one’s life span. Now a new economist, one by the name of Jessica Wolpaw Reyes from Amherst University, has tried to explain the precipitous drop in crime during the 1990’s, arguing that the drop in crime can be traced back to the reduction of lead in gasoline from the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. “Childhood lead exposure,” Reyes writes, “can lead to psychological traits that are strongly associated with aggressive and criminal behavior.” Of course, the opposite is also true: not being exposed to lead reduces violent tendencies.
Like Levitt’s claim, the lead thesis has been subject to a certain amount scrutiny and, at times, doubt. But Reyes has further opportunities to prove her findings. In places like Venezuela, where lead gasoline has just been fazed out, Reyes, in twenty years time, will be able to see if the connection between lead and violent crime is not just isolated to the United States.
“It is not common for a president to stand before the nation and say ‘Things haven’t gone well,” Michele Bachelet, Chile’s President, said in March of this year. “But that is exactly what I want to say in the case of Transantiago. The inhabitants of Santiago, especially the poorest deserve an apology.”
So what went so wrong with TranSantiago, the Chilean capital’s new bus system, that warranted a national apology from the president?
Conceived more than six years ago, TranSantiago was nothing less than a complete overhaul of Santiago’s public transit system with a particular focus on the buses that clogged the city’s streets. In broad strokes, Santiago took old, polluting buses off the streets, partially replaced them with new, clean buses, and reorganized bus routes to maximize the efficiency of the system as a whole. The whole purpose was to reduce system costs and, very specially, to reduce air pollution, a major problem due to thermal inversion in the winter months. Read the rest of this entry »
In a Pulitzer grab, The New York Times is now running a series of two-page spreads called Choking on Growth about the dark under side - namely environmental contamination - of China’s economic development. Below are several paragraphs from the article, As China Roars, Pollution Reaches Deadly Extremes, describing how increased motorization in China has left a cloud of haze sitting on Chinese cities causing a whole host of health complications.
Expanding car ownership, heavy traffic and low-grade gasoline have made autos the leading source of air pollution in major Chinese cities. Only 1 percent of China’s urban population of 560 million now breathes air considered safe by the European Union, according to a World Bank study of Chinese pollution published this year. One major pollutant contributing to China’s bad air is particulate matter, which includes concentrations of fine dust, soot and aerosol particles less than 10 microns in diameter (known as PM 10). Read the rest of this entry »
Young men use their bicycles as both a source of transportation and income. They travel vast distances between villages, up and down hills, carrying heavy amounts of produce or other goods over their back tires. Bicycles also double as taxis. It is not uncommon to see a young man laboring uphill with two passengers seated on a makeshift cushion attached to the back wheel.
Mr. Okun concludes his piece by talking about the Working Bikes Cooperative in Chicago, a non-profit organization which refurbishes trashed bikes in Chicago and redistributes them locally and internationally. On their website they write that, “Due to wage differences, a bicycle worth $20 in Chicago can be worth the equivalent of $1,000 in Africa.” I’m not too sure where these numbers come from, but I think it’s safe to say that a bike has more value in the hands of someone who needs it than it does when it’s building up dust in the garage.
Recently CNW Marketing Research, an Oregon-based automotive research group, published a paper making the audacious claim that the Hummer is actually more energy efficient than the Prius. The study later showed up in an op-ed piece by George Will, a conservative columnist for the Washington Post, who wrote that it might be responsible to buy a hummer and “squash a Prius with it.” The study was also cited uncritically in a piece from the Reason Foundation, a libertarian organization in Southern California, suggesting that the slogan for the next Save the Earth campaign should be: “Have you hugged a Hummer today?”
Peter Gleick, former MacArthur Fellow and head of the Pacific Institute, a think-tank specializing in the intersection of environment, development, and security, has made a habit of exposing junk science. His work in debunking the CNW study touted by George Will and others as a work of pseudo-science is simply excellent. As Mr. Gleick writes about his findings: Read the rest of this entry »
On Sunday, The Washington Post Magazine ran a cover story describing the transport woes Washington DC-area residents face as they move further and further outside the suburbs in order to escape the ever-expanding sprawl. Marc turner, who is profiled in the article, drives 200 miles round trip from his house in Charlottesville, Virginia to his office in Tyson’s Corner, Virginia everyday. That translates into four hours that he spends in the car, isolated from friends and family.
A view of Hyderabad. Photo by 
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